Das Rhetorische Komma

Sprachlich-Literarisches Lernen und Deutschdidaktik: Einführungen (SLLD-E), 2020

Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History, 2006

While it is trivial to state that law is communicated by means of media, it is not trivial to state that the media of law is neither the proper nor the improper of laws' proprium. The considerations on the limit of juridicial sense, once dominated by hermeneutics, are nowadays altered by a focus on the speciality of a media-e.g. the printing revolution, the rise of newly founded journals and the oral tradition. There is an old, always renewed conflict around the borders of legal systems. The thesis that modern rational abstraction of law is threatened by the postmodern iconic turn and its invasion of images has become very popular and widespread. The essay argues that humanistic instructions are the key scripts in the genealogy of media-and leave us with a better understanding of the iconic turn. The categories to understand medial transformation of law are to be found in the intersections of rhetoric and system-rooted in humanism. The essay therefore introduces a historical enquiry by Heiner Mühlmann on Leon Battista Alberti. It is to give an example from the horizon on which the ideas about media of law are to be seen.

The Introduction to this volume compares the concept of speech in classical rhetoric with the idea of language in modern pragmatics. Classical rhetoric doesn
t know anything like our modern concept of language in the sense of a system of rules or competences; the classical authors only had a concept of ungrounded speech, which is always already concretely situated, addressed and efficient. In opposition to this pragmatics (at least after Wittgenstein and Austin) tend to interpret speech acts in a foundationalist manner. They are governed by foregoing intentions, rules, institutions, and by games of giving and taking reasons. The single utterance then appears to be nothing more than the materialization of its universal preconditions.

2005

NE: Steinbrink, Bernd: Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechdich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen.

2019

2018

Handbuch Rhetorik und Philosophie, 2017

If we regard discursive practice as constitutive for the way we relate to the world, ourselves and others, then it is vitally important to ask how this practice can be formed or cultivated. For this reason, rhetoric has always been closely connected to ethics. This article attempts to explicate this relationship. It revolves around ancient conceptions of rhetoric that do not aim at establishing a system or a theory of speech, but at cultivating speech as a practice of good life. This "rhetorical ethics" of antiquity remains instructive for contemporary thinking, since it points to a way of reflecting discourse that accounts not only for the content of speech but also for how it shapes human life. In particular, it is instructive for modern ethics, since it reveals that moral discourse can be regarded as a rhetorical practice too: it is not ethically neutral but has to be reflected upon as a practice of life.

Zeitschrift Fur Sprachwissenschaft, 2007

Three voices in this dialogue reconstruct the most common views on the main function of punctuation. Performance Senior hypothesizes that punctuation is motivated by intonation Ϫ a very common but nevertheless questionable assumption. The second voice, Grammar, argues that punctuation, especially the comma, should be analyzed as representing syntactic structure. In this model the comma is a universal sign for a clause-internal non-subordinative concatenation, such as coordination or dislocation. In German and other languages there is an additional condition that licenses the comma at a clause-internal sentence boundary. The third voice, Performance Junior, pleads for a performance-based, reader-oriented reconstruction of the whole system of punctuation. Including the full stop, the colon and the semicolon in her investigation, she shows that punctuation marks reflect specific strategies of parsing sentences. This is achieved by a compositional formal and functional analysis of complex marks such as colon and semicolon. The main empirical results of the present contribution and the problems that clause-internal non-subordinative concatenation such as coordination and dislocation pose for syntactic theories force us to reconsider the relation between grammar and performance. In short, small marks make us face big issues. Appropriately for an anniversary issue, we have chosen the dialogue as a genre invented by the Ancient Greeks for purposes of rhetorical entertainment and instruction. It is particularly well suited to render opposed opinions and to encourage the readers to pursue their own train of thought.

Rhetorik, 2013

Tropes are an often underestimated methodological problem in philosophy. Therefore, in what follows their surface and deeper structure will be investigated. It is time to bring back the out of the old ornamental tradition of rhetoric into a fundamental analysis of language. I argue that the today dominant theory of substitution is not enough for explaining different understandings of self and world, because it does not help to clarify the role of tropes as thinking models. In opposite to the theory of substitution, I broach the issue of tropes as pre-figurative matter of language with the function framing the logical character of speech. So, I claim that tropes are concepts we live by.

Folia Germanica 11, 31-46, 2015

The term Rhetorische Kommunikation (engl. rhetorical communication, vgl. McCroskey 1968 „An Introduction to Rhetorical Communication“) was introduced into German–language scholarship by Brigitte Frank-Bohringer in her 1963 book of the same title and was subsequently firmly established by Helmut Geißner. It is currently used in a variety of contexts when the rhetorical dimensions of language are the focus of interest. It appears both in rhetoric manuals as well as in academic texts on the topic, including those with an empirical perspective. This contribution aims to illuminate the epistemological background to this terminology by focusing on a number of linguistically relevant communication approaches. Underlying this discussion is the differentiated use of the concept as outlined here, as well as a holistic view of spoken language, grounded in a theory of action. Finally, the practical value of the term Rhetorische Kommunikation, will be emphasized, underlining the fact that its content serves as a provable basis for the systematic and goal–oriented use of rhetoric as a theme in the teaching of German as a foreign language. The following discussion proceeds from the concept of Rhetorische Kommunikation.